Competition among health insurers is widely considered to be a means of enhancing efficiency and containing costs in the health care system. In this paper, it is argued that this could be unsuccessful since health care providers hold a strong position on the market for health care services....

Competition among health insurers is widely considered to be a means of enhancing efficiency and containing costs in the health care system. In this paper, it is argued that this could be unsuccessful since health care providers hold a strong position on the market for health care services....

We study the effects of "balance billing", i.e., allowing physicians to charge a fee from patients in addition to the fee paid by Medicare. First, we show that on pure efficiency grounds the optimal Medicare fee under balance billing is zero. An active Medicare policy thus can only be justified...

We present a growth model with micro-foundations of a mixed health care system and physician dual-practice, to analyze for welfare-optimal government financing strategy for a mixed health system in developing countries. Calibrating the model for Indonesia, we find that a government subsidy to...

Provider cost-control incentives have become an important part of the health insurance landscape in the United States. These incentives are strongest in capitated managed care organizations, especially HMOs, because such organizations are paid a fixed amount regardless of the spending they...

Despite promises that Medicare would not interfere with patients' ability to choose their physician and to purchase additional health coverage on the open market, over the decades Medicare rules and regulations have gradually eroded senior citizens' ability to control their healthcare choices....

We study whether and how physicians respond to financial incentives, making use of detailed register data on the health-care services provided to patients by general practitioners (GPs) in Norway over a six-year period (2006-11). To identify GPs' treatment responses, we exploit that...

I apply a Bayesian persuasion framework to study information transmission in the physician-patient relationship. I highlight each party’s financial incentives in this transmission and the subsequent determination of medical treatment outcomes. I estimate the model using a large database of...

Medicaid plays a vital role in the U.S. health care system and the importance of office-based physician practices to the care of Americans served cannot be overstated. Despite increases in program enrollment, a number of sources report that the proportion of U.S. office-based physicians willing...

Healthcare payers try to reduce costs by promoting the use of cheaper generic drugs. We show strong interrelations in drug prescriptions between the inpatient and outpatient sectors by using a large administrative dataset from Austria. Patients with prior hospital visits have a significantly...